Dateline Washington
This article describe the careers of alumni Rick Atkinson, David Swink, John Robbins, and Dianne Capps. This and other articles may be found in the University Archives.
Citation for this article is: Edmiston, Karen & Morton, Linda. "Dateline Washington" ECU Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1987.
Rick Atkinson
How does a 34-year-old reporter become the youngest editor on the national desk of The Washington Post ? Lawrence Rush "Rick" Atkinson '74 says it takes hard work, luck, abroad liberal education and experience.
"there are no shortcuts in journalism," Atkinson says."I've been in the business now for 11 years, and I've really worked hard at it.Starting on a small paper, working your way up, learning the business from the bottom is invaluable.A lot of people don't want to do that."
Of course, a Pulitzer Prize doesn't hurt -- Atkinson won the award in 1982 for two series he wrote for the The Kansas City Times. A five-part series on the U.S. government's management of water resources in the west examined pork barrel politics."One of the stories was on how much money the government spent trying to take the salt out of ocean water," he says.
The other prizewinner was a four-part series on the West Point Class of 1966. The stories covered the class' 15th reunion, those who had left the Army, those who were still making the Army their career, and how West Point had changed.
Atkinson plans to expand this series into a book, hopefully beginning this summer. "They're a very interesting bunch, a good vehicle for looking at what's happened in the past 25 years at West Point, and to some degree, in our society in general," he says.
Atkinson has been following the class for more than five years and attended their 20th reunion last October. "Some of them are full colonels now and will run the Army in the 1990s," he says. "Because of Vietnam, their class has the highest mortality rate of any West Point class. Out of the 579 graduates, 43 are dead."
Atkinson's interest in the military stems from his homelife -- his father is a retired Army officer."Up to the age of 18, my entire life was spent around military posts, so I'm very comfortbable with military people."
Growing up, Atkinson always planned to attend West Point. He received an appointment, but changed his mind at the last minute.
"When I realized I'd be committing myself to not only four years of West Point, but five years in the Army -- minimum it just seemed like the wrong thing to do," he says. "At that time (1970) there was no end in sight for Vietnam.
"I did the right thing for me," he adds."I would have been a lousy Army officer."
A scholarship offer influenced Atkinson's decision to attend ECU."I had a great time," he says. "I was vice president of the Student Government Association. One of my jobs was to act as a liaison to the publications board, which was responsible for the student newspaper.It was very controversial in those days.
East Carolina and Greenville were very conservative," he says. "The wave of student protest and unrest that had hit most of the country in the mid-'60s was late coming to Greenville. When it did come in the early '70s, the administration wasn't equipped to handle it.
"Students used any excuse to protest, from voting rights in North Carolina for out-of-state students to the mining of Haiphong Harbor."
In 1974 Atkinson graduated with a bachelor of arts in English. Planning to teach at the college level, he entered the University of Chicago to work on his master's.
He graduated a year later and went to Europe. "I had a job teaching English to Iranian helicopter pilots, of all things," he says.
While visiting his family in Kansas that Christmas, Atkinson found a job as a police reporter on The Pittsburg Morning Sun , a small paper with a circulation of 13,000. "I was broke, so I was happy to have a job," he says."I made $135 a week, which even in rural Kansas is hard to live on."
Atkinson covered the Bicentennial and the 1976 Republican National Convention, which was held in Kansas City that year.
In April of 1977, Atkinson was hired by The Kansas City Times , which boasted a 320,000 circulation.He started as a suburban reporter, working the 3 p.m. to midnight shift.He worked his way up to the city desk as a general assignment reporter, then to the national desk.In the spring of 1981 he moved to D.C. for a position on the Times' Washington Bureau.
The Washington Post hired him two and a half years later as a general assignment reporter for the national desk."The Post is a great place, the pinnacle of journalism," Atkinson says. "The people that work here are the best in the business. Beyond that, they're just marvelous people.
"You get this delusion that you're at the center of the universe here in Washington; it's a wonderful town."
As a reporter, Atkinson covered the U.S. bombing of Lebanon in 1983, Jesse Jackson's 1983 trip to Damascus and Geraldine Ferraro's campaign for vice president during the summer of 1984.
Despite the excitement of breaking news, Atkinson prefers lengthier projects. In 1984 he tracked a group of Army recruits from a small town in Florida from basic training to their first assignments. "That series was about a very interesting mix of people," he says. "Some were just out of high school.There was one 34-year-old woman with a child and one married couple."
"My basic conclusion was that they were very good candidates for the Army, and that the Army was attracting good people," he says.
Another extensive series -- 15 stories about the U.S. defense industry -- took most of 1985 for Atkinson and another reporter to write."We traveled a lot for that one, just tyring to get inside the defense industry as best we could," Atkinson says. "The gist of it was that the relationship between the defense industry, Congress and the Pentagon is an unholy alliance. Basically, the fundamental impulse of the defense industry is to make as much money as possible. It finds that very easy to do under the present system. But that's a gross oversimplification of a complex problem."
In September of 1985, Atkinson was named deputy national editor at the Post. He and two other editors are responsible for assigning and editing stories dealing with the State Department, the Pentagon, national security, arms control and intelligence.
Recent events which have crossed the national desk include the Achille Lauro hijacking, the summits in Geneva and Reykjavik, Ferdinand Marcos' abdication, the shuttle explosion and the Iran-Contras issue.
Editing isn't as gratifying as writing for Atkinson; he hopes to return to reporting in the future. "The hours for reporters are quite long, but the hours for editors are worse," he says. "My day consists of about 100 two-minute conversations with a succession of people. I don't get out of this building very much because I'm chained to my desk."
Much of his time is spent editing bad writing."The principal thing you're looking for in newspaper writing is clarity," he says. "People have to be able to understand it, and frequently you're writing about very complex subjects or events."
Other common problems include burying the most important information in the middle of hte story and using jargon. "People who cover certain beats tend to become experts and use jargon," he says. "They tend to think, and consequently to write, like the people they are covering. State Department reporters tend to sound like gray pin-striped diplomats, and that's not what we want."
David Swink, Psychodramatist
Although David Swink '73, '78 has never negotiated an actual hostage situation, his advice is helping hundreds of police officers resolve crises safely and confidently. As directior of the Psychodrama Training Program at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., Swink teaches police officers how to be better negotiators through the use of psychodrama, or role-playing.
Policemen enrolled in a two-week program at the FBI Academy spend one day at Saint Elizabeth's learning how to deal with mentally and emotionally disturbed persons by participating in mock hostage situations. Since about half of all hostage-takings in the United States are perpetrated by mentally ill people, those skills prove to be very valuable.
"People are always coming up to us and saying, 'The session really helped. I had a situation just like that a year later and really felt prepared for it," Swink says.
By playing themselves in psychodramas, police officers are able to hone their negotiating skills and test new strategies with the assurance that no one will get hurt. And since they're performing in front of their peers they're learning how to deal with stress.
"You can teach people how to negotiate in a classroom setting," says Swink, a native of Concord, "but in a real situation you're under a completely different physiological state. Your heart is going 160 beats a minute, sweat is pouring off your body, and you're scared to death. In that state of mind, you're going to have a hard time remembering what I told you -- unless you were able to try it out."
Psychodramas also enable police officers to better understand the motives of the people they're dealing with. "They get a chance to see how the law looks from the other side," Swink says.
Every attempt is made to make the psychodramas as realistic as possible. Interns training in psychodrama at Saint Elizabeth's play the hostages and hostage-takers and are told to remain in their roles at all times.
During a recent session for the FBI, Swink started by showing a videotape interview with a paranoid schizophrenic who had taken hostages. Following a lecture on topics such as non-verbal communication, the importance of establishing rapport and negotiating with the depressed, the first role-play began.
The trainees are seated around a raised stage, where lights focus on a table, a chair and several large blocks stacked to represent a door. A despondent woman walks onstage, sits at the table, removes a sandwich from a paper bag and takes a bite. The tuna in the sandwich triggers a reaction in the woman, who begins to rant about hearing voices in her head.
Her monologue soon reveals that the Department of Social Services (DSS) deemed her an unfit mother and took her son away. She takes a gun from a drawer and goes to the DSS to demand his return. When she realizes the clerk is not going to help her, she pulls out the gun and takes him hostage.
The negotiator, chosen from the class, steps onstage. Standing behind the blocks, he talks to the woman in an attempt to calm her down enough to release the hostage.
The action is stopped from time to time by Swink, who asks the trainees what the negotiator is doing right. They compliment his honesty and patience -- two important negotiating traits -- and suggest further lines of questioning. Armed with pointers from Swink, the negotiator continues.
Eventually the woman -- now in tears -- is persuaded to put the gun down, and the drama ends. Following applause from the audience, Swink joins the negotiator and intern on stage to discuss the episode with the class.
"It became very real," says the negotiator. "I really got swept up into her emotion."
Another role-play examines depression, and the session ends.
"Whether it's role-playing or the real thing, every time you go through one of these things you increase the chance that the people are all going to come out alive," says one session veteran.
Hostage situations used to be handled with guns, usually ending in death for just as many hostages as hostage-takers. In the '70s, a New York City policeman decided to try talking instead of shooting. "Sure enough, people started giving up after five or six hours of talking," Swink says. "Then the mental health profession got involved in it, made sort of a science out of it and started training people. Today there are very few people killed in hostage situations."
Swink is one of about 100 certified psychodrama trainers in the United States. "There aren't many of us because it's such a lengthy process," he says. "To be certified, you have to have a minimum of a master's degree in mental health and 780 hours of training from a certified trainer. That's the hard part because Saint Elizabeth's is the only place you can get paid to learn.
Psychodramatists must also be able to act so they can convincingly take on the role of a psychotic or a manic depressive. "That's why it's so effective," Swink says. "If their characters are realistic enough, the cops are going to stay in their roles."
Swink, who has undergraduate and graduate degrees in psychology, entered Saint Elizabeth's internship program after leaving Greenville. "I saw this internship advertised in the career placement book at ECU," he says. "I came up for the interview and was hired. A year later I came on staff; three years after that I became the director of training."
As director, Swink is responsible for teaching the interns how to use psychodrama as a form of therapy for hospital patients. "Obviously we're not training the patients how to be hostage negotiators. We're training them how to be higher functioning human beings," he says.
"for example, let's say your mother just died. YOu feel really guilty because you can't go to the funeral, and there are a thousand things you want to tell her but can't. Here you are in the hospital because you've had a psychotic break," he says. "What we might do in a psychodrama session is bring your mother back from the dead. Somebody in the group would take the role of your mother allowing you to complete all those things that you wanted to do with her."
Saint Elizabeth's, which is federally funded, began training Washington-area police officers in the early 1950s as a public service. In addition to the FBI, psychodrama has been used to trian Secret Service and State Department employees in handling potential assassins and suicidal individuals.
When the demand became too great for the hospital, Swink and two colleagues at Saint Elizabeth's started their own consulting firm, Police Action Consultation and Training (PACT). The name was recently changed to Action Training Institute (ATI), since policemen aren't their only clients.
"We work with most of the federal agencies through Saint Elizabeth's, and with non-federal agencies through our company," Swink says.
In addition to role-plays, ATI trains negotiators through full-scale simulations. "Role-plays are not as real because we manipulate the action by stopping it from time to time," Swink says. "Simulations involve the entire response team. We do it out on the streets in an entire building or apartment complex."
In 1985 a simulation the company did for a Washington-area police department was featured on the CBS television program 60 Minutes. The PACT segment was the program's longest at 28 minutes.
In the segment, Swink played the role of a paranoid schizophrenic who took some hostages at a chemical company which had just fired him. "I stayed in the role for six hours without stopping," he says. "Anytime you do that for six hours, you start to hallucinate. YOu really get scared, knowing they could come in and kill you any time."
Although the cameras didn't make Swink nervous, Dianne Sawyer did. "I was still somewhat in the role when I was talking to her," he says. "It's not something you can come out of immediately. I usually meet with the psychologist afterwards to get myself back together psychologically, but I didn't have time that day."
Swink spent most of January in New Zealand, where he conducted workshops for the annual conference of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Psychodrama, and trained members of the New Zealand Royal Police.
When he's not working, Swink can be found skiing a snow-covered mountain or jumping from an airplane. "I make about 80 jumps a year," he says, "every other weekend when the weather is good."
For the past eight years, Swink has participated in the ECU Homecoming stadium jump. "This was the first Homecoming I've ever missed," he says. "It was my wife's 30th birthday. She's always spent her birthday at my Homecoming watching me jump into the stadium. I really couldn't put her through that again."
John Robbins, Producer/Host
WETA, Washington, D.C.'s educational television station, has a rare treasure in John "Jay" Robbins '61. With degrees in both art and music from ECU and three years experience as a fifth-grade teacher, Robbins can handle all phases of program production.For Cover to Cover, a reading motivational series for children, Robbins serves as host, selects the books which are featured, designs the animated art, illustrates on camera and composes and records the music.
Robbins created the series in 1965 to combat the drastic drop in national reading scores. Although television was blamed for hte drop -- based on the assumption that children would rather watch television than read -- Robbins believed the medium could also be used to encourage reading.
"I was doing a series called Exploring Our Language which devoted two or three programs to good books," Robbin says. "I suggested we take those programs out of Exploring Our Language, call them Cover to Cover, and do a series about books and reading.
"the programs are intended as enrichment, not direct teaching," he says. "They're to help classroom teachers convince the kids that leisure reading is enjoyable and entertaining.
"My question has always been, whey do we go to the trouble of teaching word attack skills, learning through context and all the mechanics of reading if we don't give some rewards for reading?" he says. "Well, the reward is reading, and kids discover this once they're motivated to get started."
Cover to Cover encourages reading through the use of what Robbins calls "the cliff-hanger approach." Each program begins with a passage from the beginning of a book. "I introduce the characters and the plot by paraphrasing hte story," says Robbins. "During this reading the story is illustrated by animated characters we've drawn in advance."
Later Robbins draws on camera as the narrator reads another passage. This second reading is taken from the climax but does not weaken the conclusion. "They have to go to the library, get the book and read it to find out what happened," Robbins says. "It works."
The series, which can be purchased on video cassette or seen on educational stations across the country, has proven to be very popular.
"Last year I hated to read books," wrote one viewer. "But after your show I learned that there really are interesting books to read."
Another wrote, " While on a recent business trip to Texas, I watched your Cover to Cover program on a local public TV affiliate. The storytelling was brisk, and the drawings were vivid. The show was just as exciting as it was the last time I saw it -- as a nine-year-old fifth-grader at Blessed Sacrament School in Alexandria, Va.
"I am now a 27-year-old attorney with a love for literature instilled by your program. Thank you for introducing me to Johnny Tremaine and Pippy Longstocking, as well as Stephen Dedalus and Emma Bovary. I owe you an unrepayable debt."
The critics has also been kind to Cover to Cover. THe series has received many awards over the years, including the Chicago International Film Festival's Gold Hugo Award, two Ohio State awards and the silver medal from the International Film and TV Festival of New York.
"The key to a good reading instruction program is well-selected materials," Robbins says of his success. "Some of the new writers are marvelous -- Betsy Bynum, Kathy Patterson, and of course, all the kids like Judy Blume, although she is sometimes controversial.
"Classroom teachers do not have time to read the latest children's books because they come out by the thousands each year," he adds. "Librarians are now media directors, so they don't have time to read. Kids simply need someone to tell them what a book is about, whether it's a mystery or a comedy, a detective story or a family-problem story. Once they're introduced to the characters and situation, they want to read it to find out the ending."
Cover to Cover series have been produced in two-grade combinations for third- adn fourth-graders and fifth- and sixth-graders. Each series takes from one year to 18 months to complete and has a shelf life of five to 10 years. "Teachers get tired of watching the same programs, and the books go out of print," he says. "So we remake the series every few years."
Robbins was raised in Greenville, where he spent hours fishing and swimming in the Tar River -- when he wasn't drawing or playing the piano. He accepted scholarships in both art and music at ECU.
"I took art courses one semester and music the next," he says. "You couldn't do both. You couldn't keep a sketch book going and turn it in on a weekly basis while also practicing to play in a monthly recital.
"They drain music majors, or they did then. You had to accompany a singer, be in at least one vocal group, wind ensemble, band and orchestra. I just took my time and juggled them back and forth. That's why it took me five and a half years to finish."
During the summer, Robbins found work at Virginia Beach, Va., playing piano for dances and restaurants. "Half my fraternity brothers (Lambda Chi) went there or were from there," he says. "That was the place to go then. There were jobs to be had, unlike at Nags Head or Morehead."
In the summer of 1959 Robbins heard about a teaching position available in Maryland. He intervieweed for the job and was hired. "I swore I'd never teach, but that was my first peramanent job," Robbins says. I wanted to be a commercial artist, bu there was more money to be made as a teacher."
Robbins was able to teach before finishing hs degrees because of the baby boom. "They were snatching people off the streets just to cover the classrooms," he says. "The class I took had had two substitutes. The poor kids weren't learning anything because they were having someone new every week."
During his three years in the classroom, Robbins realized that his students were far more interested in contemporary books than traditional classics. "I really started liking children's books through my fifth-graders," he says. "I read what they were reading because I discovered that reading Alice in Wonderland and Wind in the Willows just didn't work."
Robbins left teaching in 1961 long enough to complete his last 12 hours at ECU. In 1962, WETA/TV hired him as a studio teacher. He enjoyed the freedom television allowed, although the challenges were different from classroom teaching.
"The main problem is retaining your ability to communicate through the camera, not letting it become a block," he says. "It's easy. You simply ignore all the technology and talk straight to the people you hope to communicate with. You just pretend."
Robbins' success with Cover to Cover led to the production of other similar series -- Storybound for sixth-graders; Matter of Fact and Matter of Fiction for seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders; The Book Bird for fourth-graders; and Read It! for sixth-graders.
The Book Bird and Read It! also recieved Ohio State Awards, which according to Robbin s, are the most prestigious awards presented in instructional television. In addition, he has received two Emmy Awards -- one for A Matter of Fiction and one for a ballet he produced at WETA.
"At times I've functioned as a general affairs producer, so I've been able to do opera, ballet and poetry," Robbins says. "I've even hosted a math series, but that was all on the teleprompter. I just sat there and read it I didn't know what I was saying."
Robbins enjoys these occasional breaks from children's literature. A recent series he produced for junior and senior high students, entitled Across Cultures, examined life in three very different countries.
"In Mexico we were with the Tarahumara Indians 10,000 feet up in the Sierra Mountains," he says. "They have a very simple life-style. On the Ivory Coast we were in a village in the rain forest. We went to the coffee and cocoa fields with the father, to the market with the mother, and to the school with the kids. In Japan, it was high tech everything."
Robbins has also filmed in King Tut's tomb, on the fjords of Norway, the moors in England and on Masada in Israel.
In the future, Robbins would like to produce educational series on art and music for children. "For the art series, the studio would be set up like an art class," he says. "Children watching would feel like they were having hands-on art lessons. For the music series, a group of accomplished musicians in a small, living-room-type setting could discuss instruments and show how they work."
He hopes that one of his personal projects, a story he wrote entitled The Tooth Fairy is Broke, will someday be shown as a primetime special on network television. An animation house in New York is holding the story while two toothpaste companies decide whether or not they want to sponsor it.
Dianne Capps, White House Nurse
Giving an injection is not usually a nerve-wracking experience, says Dianne Capps '70, a registered nurse. But when the patient is the president of the United States, a few butterflies appear.Presidential treatments are now routine for Capps, who has spent the past four years in Washington, D.C., as a member of the White House Medical Unit. "President Reagan puts you at ease immediately," she says. "He's a very cooperative patient."
The unit's four nurses and three doctors represent all branches of the military and have many duties, the most important of which is providing immediate emergency medical care for the president. They travel with Reagan, whether it's for a vacation at his California ranch, or a summit in Iceland.
"His personal physician is always on Air Force Once," Capps says. "If I am the nurse on duty, I am on the ground when he lands and do not leave that city until he takes off."
For U.S. visits, Capps usually goes two days ahead of the president to survey the area's hospitals and ambulance services. "In conjunction with the Secret Service, we try to think of any possible thing that could happen to him and how we would handle it," she says.
Foreign trips take more advance planning, sometimes as much as a week or more. "In some areas the medical care is not as advanced as ours," she says. "More extensive contingency plans are required."
Between the president's travels and occasional trips by the vice president, which are also covered by the unit, Capps has seen much of the world, including China, Russia, England, Ireland, France, Germany, Costa Rica, Thailand, Japan, Africa, Luxemburg, Mexico, Canada, Switzerland, and Indonesia.
When she's not traveling, Capps is on duty at one of the two clinics located on the White House grounds. "It's basically a military clinic for those who work at the White House," she says. "We treat acute minor illnesses and emergencies."
Civilians touring the White House are also treated at the clinics. "If someone had a heart attack, we'd certainly do what emergency care we could, then arrange for transfer to a nearby hospital," Capps says. "there are a lot of fainters in the summer."
Reagan's occasional hospital stays mean more typical work for Capps and the other nurses. "It's fun," she says. "We get to do some real nursing."
Nursing was what Capps had in mind when she enrolled at East Carolina in 1966. "I've wanted to be a nurse ever since I was a little girl," Capps says. "My mother said I'd never make it; I couldn't stand the sight of blood."
Capps credits ECU's nursing program with allaying her fears. "They eased you into it," she says. The Army, however, did not. Her first nursing assignment was on a cancer ward in a San Francisco hospital. Nine months later she was sent to Vietnam.
Although it took a while to get used to it, Capps says her year in Vietnam was a good experience. "We did things I'm sure our nursing instructors would not approve of," she says. "However, we were certainly not operating under ideal conditions. If we started an I.V. on someone and the vein collapsed, or we didn't get it in the first try, we didn't start with a new needle. We used the same one until we got it in because we didn't know when we'd get more supplies."
Capps was close enough to hear the fighting, but was never injured. "The first week I was there we had a red alert and had to run to the bunker. I was scared to death," she says. "It took me a while to realize how well protected we were. It probably would have had to be a direct hit on our unit for me to have gotten hurt."
Capps joined the Army at ECU through the Army Student Nurse Program. "It was the Army's way of recruiting nurses," she says. "They paid for my senior year of nursing school. To repay that, I owed them two years of active duty. I gave them my two years and then some."
The program was not a popular one in those days, since those who signed up were practically assured of being sent to Vietnam. Only two others in Capps' 78-member class joined.
"My mother made me promise not to volunteer for Vietnam, but I told her I would not try to get out of the orders if I got them," she says. "As it turned out, I was the only one of those three that was sent. One girl was released from her obligation; the other stayed in the Army for five years."
Although she's an Army brat, Capps didn't have a miliatry career in mind when she joined. "It was a very money conscious decision on my part," she says. "I wanted to experience normal college life. I wanted to join Alpha Xi Delta Sorority, and that was expensive. I also needed a car for my public health rotation. In order for me to do those things, I had to have more money coming in."
Capps says her ECU education prepared her well for "the real world of nursing. From my very first day on duty, I was able to contribute to the nursing team," she says. "It was a comfortable transition for me, and I credit my school of nursing for that."
Capps returned to Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco following her year in Vietnam, where she remained for the next seven years. Two of those years were spent were spent as a civilian. "I got out when I got married because I had transfer orders and my husband didn't," she says. "It was either leave the Army or leave him. My husband was in the middle of his orthopedic residency program and couldn't move."
Capps' civilian years were spent in the surgical intensive care unit. "I just took my rank off and put my ECU nursing pin on for the first time," she says.
Capps joined the Army again and was sent -- with her husband -- to Fort Bragg, where she continued in surgical intensive care. "My rank remained the same, but I lost some time toward my next promotion, so I'm a little behind my peers," she says.
At the end of her third year at Fort Bragg, Capps was asked if she would like to be considered for an opening at the White House. "I had been in the Army for 12 years, but had never heard of this medical unit," she says. "I came for an interview in January and was told if I wanted the job I could have it."
Capps has a simple explanation for her selection. "I fit the criteria," she says. "They were looking for someone with a background in intensive care; I had that with my Vietnam experience. They wanted someone who had been in the Army for a number of years and who ranked a captain or above. You also have to be within the Army's height and weight requirements because it's a high visibility job."
After the exhilaration of Vietnam and intensive care, Capps found the White House -- despite its glamour -- a little hard to get used to. "A lot of the job is boring; it's sitting around hoping that nothing will happen," she says. "This is a lifetime experience; it's not a nursing experience. ONce I learned to accept that, I relaxed in the job and began to enjoy it."
Nevertheless, Capps is looking forward to her next tour of duty, which she hopes will be at Martin Army Hospital in Fort Benning, Ga., where her newly-retired husband plans to go into private practice. "It's been fun, but I'm anxious to get back to doing hands-on nursing," she says. "I couldn't stay in this job even if I wanted to; I'd lose my skills."
